While there may be several differences between cloud and traditional security, organizations can achieve the most robust stance against cyber risks in the cloud by borrowing a similar approach to due diligence as they would for their on-premises environment. Below are the breakdown of the six pillars of cloud security:

1. Secure Access Controls (SAC) A good security strategy starts by setting up secure Identity and Access Management (IAM) protocols. Ensure that team members have the minimum level of access to the systems, tools, and APIs required to do their jobs. As privileges increase, so should the level of authentication needed to gain access. Workers should follow strong password policies.
2. Zero-Trust Network Security Controls Keep your mission-critical systems and operations in strategically insulated portions of your cloud network. Insulate secure workloads from those that do not require data security protocols and enforce these micro-segments with strict security policies.
3. Change Management Use change management protocols offered by your cloud security provider to govern change and apply compliance controls any time a change is requested, a new server is provisioned, or sensitive resources are moved or changed. Change management applications will give you auditing functionality that can detect unusual behavior and deviation from protocol so that you can investigate, or can initiate automatic mitigation to correct the issue.
4. Firewall for Web Applications A web application firewall (WAF) will check traffic into and out of your web application and servers to monitor and alert the administrator of any unusual behavior to prevent breaches and strengthen endpoint security.
5. Data Protection: To provide enhanced data security, your organization should encrypt data at every transport layer. Additionally, there should be security protocols applied to any file sharing, communication operations, and any other area within your environment where data might be stored, used, or transmitted.
6. Continuous Monitoring Many cloud security providers can offer insight into your cloud-native logs by comparing them against internal logs from your other security tools such as asset management, change management, vulnerability scanners, as well as external risk intelligence. This can encourage faster incident response and the implementation of remediation workflows.